141: Feels just like a Saturday
Y'know what I did today?
Nothing.
My two classes were effectively moved online (as videos for me to watch later), and the third class, which is a waste of my time under normal conditions, did not have the pull to get me out of bed. I slept, which was honestly so nice. I think I've been averaging like 6.5 hours of sleep for the last 9 weeks, so a night of 12 was wonderful.
It was even nicer when I did absolutely nothing with my day. I didn't go to the one remaining class, because why would I, and it was 11-12 anyway, so it's not like I could have.
To be perfectly clear, the way that the grading scheme works in that class, as long as I turn in the last homework (due December 2nd), I don't even have to take the final (and I probably won't). The grade is based on two of the three exams, and since I did pretty well on the two midterms, the final can be the exam that gets "dropped", so I can just let it be a zero, since it doesn't factor into my grade at all. Homework is like 10%, and I'll do the last one to finish out that 10% (it's entirely graded on attempt, not on accuracy or completion), so I'll be totally fine.
It feels slightly bad, but if I'm going to be completely honest, the system that the modern university has built doesn't actually select for or encourage learning the material, it encourages maximizing magic numbers (grades) over all else. Grades do correlate with knowledge, but in many cases it is not direct causation. That EE335 class, for example, is fine, I've been barely learning the material, and doing essentially the bare minimum on the homeworks to get my grades on them, and then I'm good at making shit up on the fly and I've always been good at test-taking, so I pulled ahead of the curve on the two midterms, but if you gave me an actual, difficult exam (I don't think those ones were tbh) I wouldn't have the knowledge. I definitely won't have the knowledge come January.
The system selects for people who can grade-max, and I'm too jaded to be properly numbers-maxxing (I think I have a 3.6-something GPA), but the Pareto Principle holds, so I'm getting by just as well.
I should be less burnt out next quarter, this quarter has just been rough, and I am so ready to take a week off, come back for not even really a full week, and then go home.
The thing I did do today is play like 5 hours of Silksong. I beat it and unlocked the 1st ending (the simplest one, there are more). I probably want to get to the other endings, to see them, but since Silksong doesn't report completion % like Hollow Knight does, and since I'm growing tired of losing over and over and over again, I probably won't go as far with this game as I did with Hollow Knight. I made it to 103% completion in Hollow Knight (that's 100% of the base game, + some extras), I won't be doing that in Silksong; it's a more difficult game, and my life is in a very different place now, so I don't have the spare time nor spare willpower for that enterprise. I beat Hollow Knight in 11th grade, much of it during AP Euro and AP Bio classes, which is insane in hindsight.
It's 12:45 as I write this, and I'm not really tired, but I should probably go to bed, so that I can wake up tomorrow at a reasonable hour, and maybe get some stuff done.
I made a to-do list for myself over break, we'll see if I remember to reference it.